Today,
my rhythm continues as I got up at a reasonable amount of sleep again! I feel
so great because when classes started it was so weird going to school again and
having school work so I was really flustered and found it hard to blog and read
all the course material and go to sleep at a reasonable hour, but now I am
doing very well and handling all the work well.
Today in class we learned about how human rights are enforced on the domestic level. Instead of having our TA sessions after lunch, we had an absolutely amazing guest speaker who is at this moment the highlight of the class. She gave the most helpful lecture in the class because she discussed her work on enforcing housing rights in Tompkins County and enforcing human rights on a local level. I took five pages of notes because this knowledge is exactly what I need to bring home and what I want to bring home so I can use it in my school and neighborhood so I can fulfill my dream of improving my community. After that class I felt super motivated, but it was hot and my big lunch settled and I felt sleepy so I went back to my dorm to nap and take a shower.
Later Javaria and I decided to go out because we haven’t done anything fun that wasn’t related to class recently so we went to college town to get Boba tea and some pretty touristy and dumb T-shirts, but we couldn’t resist. If this summer experience is anything close to real college, then I am absolutely going to LOVE College. I am so excited and motivated I spent most of afternoon blogging, reading and making plans for the start of school so I can implement what I learned in my class.
Today in class we learned about how human rights are enforced on the domestic level. Instead of having our TA sessions after lunch, we had an absolutely amazing guest speaker who is at this moment the highlight of the class. She gave the most helpful lecture in the class because she discussed her work on enforcing housing rights in Tompkins County and enforcing human rights on a local level. I took five pages of notes because this knowledge is exactly what I need to bring home and what I want to bring home so I can use it in my school and neighborhood so I can fulfill my dream of improving my community. After that class I felt super motivated, but it was hot and my big lunch settled and I felt sleepy so I went back to my dorm to nap and take a shower.
Later Javaria and I decided to go out because we haven’t done anything fun that wasn’t related to class recently so we went to college town to get Boba tea and some pretty touristy and dumb T-shirts, but we couldn’t resist. If this summer experience is anything close to real college, then I am absolutely going to LOVE College. I am so excited and motivated I spent most of afternoon blogging, reading and making plans for the start of school so I can implement what I learned in my class.
Today
I got up went to breakfast and had A LOT of cereal. I don’t get much
cereal at home so I took advantage of the massive amount of cereal available.
I walked to class anticipating the next class because I read the material three times and I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of the reading.
The class was very interesting because we finally finished our discussion on symphysiotomy being practiced in Ireland without the woman’s consent. We talked about what provisions of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women) were violated and had to apply the provisions to a legal argument. I thought this was really fun and came really easily to me because in Mock Trial I had to use case law and the Constitution of the United States to argue in a “trial”. After we had a discussion of what provisions we would use and how we would use them (the class agreed on what provisions, but had different ways of using them). The interesting question was whether or not the case would be admissible because many cases of symphysiotomy happened before Ireland signed the CEDAW so I thought it wouldn’t be admissible. But the instructor and other students brought up the fact that it would be admissible based on the fact that Ireland took no action to redress or pay reparations to the women who were affected by the procedure. Ireland’s lack of action makes it admissible because in many ways inaction on the part of a state to stop or redress a certain human right violation is the same as directly violating someone’s rights.
I walked to class anticipating the next class because I read the material three times and I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of the reading.
The class was very interesting because we finally finished our discussion on symphysiotomy being practiced in Ireland without the woman’s consent. We talked about what provisions of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women) were violated and had to apply the provisions to a legal argument. I thought this was really fun and came really easily to me because in Mock Trial I had to use case law and the Constitution of the United States to argue in a “trial”. After we had a discussion of what provisions we would use and how we would use them (the class agreed on what provisions, but had different ways of using them). The interesting question was whether or not the case would be admissible because many cases of symphysiotomy happened before Ireland signed the CEDAW so I thought it wouldn’t be admissible. But the instructor and other students brought up the fact that it would be admissible based on the fact that Ireland took no action to redress or pay reparations to the women who were affected by the procedure. Ireland’s lack of action makes it admissible because in many ways inaction on the part of a state to stop or redress a certain human right violation is the same as directly violating someone’s rights.
We
went on to talk about how states enforce human rights domestically. We
discussed theories of Dualism and Monism, civil and common law systems and self-executing
and non-self-executing treaties. I found this very interesting, because I would
prefer this blog not being 3,000 to 5,000 words. I can use that many words just
describing Monism and Dualism and my thoughts on it. So I will move on to lunch
which I had with Javaria and people from our class. It was fun to talk to them
and when we walked back to our class for the guest speaker we saw a cute bunny,
but all my pictures of it looked like a blurry brown dot.
We
made it to the hall again and listened to the guest speaker. And she was
amazing. Her name was Karen Baer and she is the director of the Tompkins County
Office of Human Rights. Her talk was so amazing to me because it was directly
related to what I want to do in my community. Her talk was broadly about how to
enforce human rights on the local scale, but she went in depth about the
different rights people have such as human rights and civil rights and the
different types such as social, economic or political rights.
But the part that really sparked my interest and got me excited was when she talked about what she was doing in Tomkins County to protect housing rights to Section 8 voucher holders. The problem was that Section 8 voucher holders trying to find an apartment were being rejected by landlords at massively high rates especially when compared to people who don’t have vouchers. This disproportionately effected women (especially single mothers), and racial minorities. What Mrs. Baer did to combat this was to find the issue and research it. She gathered all the data she could. She looked for data that supported her side and data that didn’t help her side because she wanted to make sure what she is fighting is real and needs to change. She also talked to landlords to find out why they were denying Section 8 voucher holders. Many of the reasons were misconceptions. The biggest one was that Section 8 voucher holders were bad tenants and drug dealers or criminal when in all of Ms. Baer’s research showed the opposite because voucher holders tend to be long term and reliable tenants.
She is currently working on the legislative side to get a bill passed to protect voucher holders’ rights. The thing that hit me the most besides how she described the process behind enforcing rights was when she said “Don’t blindly trust your community when they say they are progressive.” That spoke strongly to me because I heard that before many times from teachers, counselors and other members of my community and it is used in a way to say “Don’t worry there is nothing really wrong in our community.” Ms. Baer’s word spoke strongly to me because it made me think critically and be skeptical of what those teachers and counselors told me. It also opened my eyes to the fact that no matter how many progressive values a community accepts there are still blind spots when it comes to human rights. I stayed behind with Javaria a little to ask Ms. Baer about her career, but after that we walked to our dorms.
But the part that really sparked my interest and got me excited was when she talked about what she was doing in Tomkins County to protect housing rights to Section 8 voucher holders. The problem was that Section 8 voucher holders trying to find an apartment were being rejected by landlords at massively high rates especially when compared to people who don’t have vouchers. This disproportionately effected women (especially single mothers), and racial minorities. What Mrs. Baer did to combat this was to find the issue and research it. She gathered all the data she could. She looked for data that supported her side and data that didn’t help her side because she wanted to make sure what she is fighting is real and needs to change. She also talked to landlords to find out why they were denying Section 8 voucher holders. Many of the reasons were misconceptions. The biggest one was that Section 8 voucher holders were bad tenants and drug dealers or criminal when in all of Ms. Baer’s research showed the opposite because voucher holders tend to be long term and reliable tenants.
She is currently working on the legislative side to get a bill passed to protect voucher holders’ rights. The thing that hit me the most besides how she described the process behind enforcing rights was when she said “Don’t blindly trust your community when they say they are progressive.” That spoke strongly to me because I heard that before many times from teachers, counselors and other members of my community and it is used in a way to say “Don’t worry there is nothing really wrong in our community.” Ms. Baer’s word spoke strongly to me because it made me think critically and be skeptical of what those teachers and counselors told me. It also opened my eyes to the fact that no matter how many progressive values a community accepts there are still blind spots when it comes to human rights. I stayed behind with Javaria a little to ask Ms. Baer about her career, but after that we walked to our dorms.
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